NDP sounds alarm over GTH’S truck traffic numbers

The volume of traffic flowing to the Global Transportation Hub (GTH) is wildly off what the Saskatchewan government once projected.

In 2014, the provincial government estimated more than 6,400 trucks a day would be passing through the GTH, primarily by using Regina’s west bypass; but according to the GTH’S annual report, there are only 4,600 trucks going to it each week.

That doesn’t sit well with NDP GTH critic Cathy Sproule.

“This is definitively something that I think taxpayers should be alarmed about, because the projections for the GTH are not playing out,” she said.

Adding to Sproule’s concern is a lack of information over the additional cost for “free flow ” access to the GTH from the west bypass.

“What is the specific free flow access to the GTH costing?” she asked, asserting one of the GTH tenants, Loblaws, is the only one benefiting from such access, meaning taxpayers likely paid a significant amount of money to benefit a private company.

But how much money remains unclear: the province won’t release how much the free flow access added to the tab of the bypass project and refuses to release what, if anything, Loblaws paid for its land at the GTH.

Asked about those costs, Highways Minister Lori Carr said, “We need to take the whole project into consideration here,” saying the project is 90 per cent and it is a “great project for our economy.”

“The bypass was tendered as a project as a whole, the entire project, so we don’t break it out by west, east, south,” she said.

“It’s a project as a whole. From our government’s stand, it was (always) a project as a whole.”

The minister also said she didn’t know if it was “so much a concern” of the number of trucks flowing through the GTH today.

“As soon as the bypass is fully de- veloped, the counts are definitely going to go up, the development in that area is going to grow more from where we’re at now and the numbers absolutely will increase,” she said.

Sproule said any such projections from Carr are “hypothetical” because the GTH has not been able to sell any land for two years, and the province is now attempting to divest itself of the facility, located west of Regina.